United Marxist Nations wrote:-
Proto-Socialism: A stage with some aspects of socialism, but lacking sufficient workers' control of the state.
Why invent a new term? Depending on the shade of meaning one wishes to impart, the terms degenerate workers' state and Proletarian Bonapartist state express roughly the same idea and are more scientifically accurate.
In many arguments about the USSR, there is oftentimes to debate on what terms to use in describing it. Some use "state socialism", "state capitalism", or "degenerated workers' state". All of these terms are incorrect: the USSR was not socialist (as the means of production were not controlled by the proletariat), nor was it capitalist (as the means of production were not controlled by a bourgeois), and it had never achieved socialism, so it can therefore not be called a workers' state which has degenerated.
The idea of a degenerated workers state does not imply that they USSR achieved socialism in the first place, it merely indicates that the USSR began as a relatively healthy proletarian state and was moving in the direction of socialism. In
The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky characterized the USSR as a transitional form partway between capitalism and socialism and capable of moving in either direction either depending on the balance of forces (whether the Soviet proletariat could achieve the political revolution).
The answer lies in the Nomenklatura; while not a bourgeois, but a bureaucracy, the nomenklatura was able to plan out the economy of the USSR, and thus held a privileged position within the state. It was thus in their power and interest to maintain the proto-socialist order. Thus, they introduced the false doctrine of "peaceful co-existence", which stated that class conflict isn't necessarily always in motion. Moreover, the Party's rhetoric changed in this period from an understanding that socialism needed to be built, to one of having already attained such a system.
True enough, but it is important to understand that the domination of the USSR by the bureaucracy was not a post-war phenomena. Rather it has occurred as early as 1924 with the seeds for it being sown well before that. By the time of the Spanish civil war, the bureaucracy was consciously seeking to stifle revolutionary moments abroad in order to pacify the proletariat at home and used the false doctrines of socialism in one country and the Economist-Menshevik two-stage theory to do so- the purges were also a part of this effort to pacify the Soviet working class and solidify the rule of the bureaucracy, with all the main old Bolsheviks being imprisoned/executed/assassinated/marginalized they essentially amounted to a one-sided civil war against the party of Lenin.
Marx and Engels said, how can socialism arise out of a stage in which capitalism does not exist?
It can't on a world scale. Lenin, Trotsky, and the other Bolshevik leaders understood that which is why the laid such stress in the necessity of a world revolution. They all understand that the Russian empire was not ready for socialism and that the first tasks of the revolution were bourgeois democratic tasks. However as both Marx and Trotsky noted, in the theory of permanent revolution, the Russian bourgeois was not a revolutionary class. The proletariat did in fact take power in Russia in 1917 and was drawn into beginning the task of the socialist reconstruction of society- it will be so drawn whenever it takes power- but could not maintain political power in the conditions of backwardness and isolation foisted upon it.
We are left with one conclusion: the USSR was fatally stunted by the conditions from which it arose; while it is possible that later nomenklatura, in the eras of Stalin (post-1950), Khrushchev, Brezhnev, etc. could have saved it be implementing a true Soviet Republic, but it was not in the interests of these bureaucracies to do so. Thus, it seems that the failure can not necessarily be pinned upon any one ideological fault, or any individual, or on economic stagnation, socialism, or a Vanguard Party, but upon the lack of capitalism in the society from which socialism arose.
Your analysis is correct but one sided. You correctly point to the conditions of terrible backwardness and feudal nature of Tsarist society as a major factor in understand the failure of the Soviet experiment, but fail to note how widespread poverty, the effects of the civil war and WW1, and most importantly the international betrayal of social democracy conditioned this failure.
However, now most of the world is either in a stage of capitalism, or in fledgling capitalism, the proletariat is large, it is largely literate, etc. The conditions exist now for socialism to arise, be it in the West, or in the East.
The world as a whole was ready of socialism in 1917, the problem was that the revolution remained isolated in backward Russia due to the betrayals of international social democracy in the 2nd International and the ultimately the theoretical helplessness of Stalin and the reactionary role played by the Thermidorian bureaucracy on a world scale.
Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2014 3:34 pm
